Shareware Author Tips - A few words of advice.

(this article is part of a series)

SpamButcher is a small independent software vendor. I won't get into headcount, but we are indeed small. We've been around a little over four years.

Commercial software offered by small companies for trial is often referred to as "shareware." Historically shareware has meant something a little different - but I don't reject the term.

So, you're a "shareware" author, or are otherwise selling software online. You should probably read the rest of this document.

I'm not going to divulge all my secrets. I'm certainly not giving away any specifics on how to be successful selling spam blocker programs. But I have learned a few things over time. If I knew these things four years ago - I (and the rest of team SpamButcher) would be richer today.

Is the Game Worth Playing?

This hasn't been a major problem for SpamButcher. The market for software products to prevent spam email has truly blossomed since the product was first released. On the other hand, I've been involved enough with the shareware market to know many, many applications just don't go anyplace.

The truth is we also tried to launch one other application not related to spam email that I won't get into in detail. Lets just say that not everyone grows up to be an astronaut - it has not exactly taken off.

If your time investment is minimal - this isn't a problem. On the other hand, if you put in 180 hours last month, and it resulted in $360 in sales - you need to do the math.

Many authors (including myself at times) find themselves in the grey area. Consider how much your time is worth, and what you think the prospects of growing the business are.

If your day-job pays $25 an hour - you might be pretty happy making $18 an hour working for yourself, but probably not $4 an hour.

Understand Problems with Your Product

There are a few ways to figure out what's working, and what's not.

The easiest thing to implement is a post-uninstall survey. As part of the uninstall process you can launch a webpage simply asking a few (optional) questions about the user's experience, and why they uninstalled.

As a result, we know on an ongoing basis roughly how many users get the product working, how many have problems with poor spam catcher performance and how many generally like the product but just aren't willing to pay money.

This information can then be used to tweak the product, and track the impact of those changes.

A little more tricky is tying a survey, or actual error reporting into a crash detection system.

Microsoft has done this for a while and their efforts inspired us. As a result we've identified and eliminated a bug that was impacting about 3% of users and probably hurting sales more than that.

Your Website is Your Business - Promote It

You need to read this (also available here).

For various reasons this article seems difficult to find - if nothing else - try Googling "26 steps to 15k a Day". It's worth hunting it down.

Developing a flow of free traffic to your site is crucial to profitability. The above mentioned article will tell you how to do it.

Alternately, paying for advertising using Google Adwords or Overture can be profitable, but you must implement "conversion tracking" to determine if the clicks are turning into sales or not. Otherwise, you may simply be throwing away money.

The reason systems like Adwords work is because users are specifically searching for terms you've decided describe your product.

In contrast, I have also tried advertising using banner-ads and other "untargeted" methods. From my experience they are -painfully- unprofitable, and can't think of any reason to recommend them.

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